Pirate Bay beset by tainted ads

Here be malware!

A hack on ad servers used by the Pirate Bay is exposing visiting surfers to malware.

Site vulnerabilities in the ad delivery systems used by the torrent tracking site were exploited to plant malicious scripts, causing sections of the site to be blacklisted and blocked by Google (see here) and various security utilities.

TorrentFreak reckons the root cause of the problem stems from vulnerabilities in OpenX, the platform used in the Pirate Bay's ad-serving system.

The tainted ads exposed visiting surfers to Windows Trojans via drive-by download attacks. Pirate Bay has experienced similar problems in the past, and it's unclear how long it will take to clear up the latest issues.

Surfers can minimise their exposure to these sorts of attacks by making sure their systems are fully patched and running up-to-date anti-virus scanners. ®